Yahoo! is going to be shutting down Yahoo! Photos in favour of Flickr in the next few months. Flickr’s popularity has surpassed Yahoo! Photos and it makes a lot of sense to more to the more flexible and powerful photo sharing site. According to TechCrunch:
Yahoo is not forcing transition to Flickr – instead, users are being given the option of choosing among a number of top photo sharing sites. If you are a current Yahoo! Photos user, you will be given the option to export all your photos into Flickr (a one-click process) or you will be able to export to a few other services such as Photobucket, Snapfish, Kodak Gallery or Shutterfly. Most of these services have built special tools to transition users, Butterfield said. Users will also be able to download full sized original photos, or order CDs and prints at a discount to the normal price. “We have no interest in forcing anyone to switch to Flickr” Butterfield said. “We want happy users.”
Yahoo Photos is currently the largest photo sharing site on the Internet, with around 2 billion stored photos. Flickr, by comparison, has around 500 million photos. But Flickr is also growing much faster than Yahoo photos and coincidentally has just exceeded Yahoo! Photos in traffic, according to Comscore.
In light of this move I wonder what will happen with del.icio.us and Yahoo!’s revamped Bookmarks service. According to A VC, del.icio.us has surpassed Yahoo! Bookmarks and this begs the question whether Yahoo!’s service will give way to its acquisition and social phenomenon?
I really don’t see the point of having two competing services in the same stable. The difficulty with Yahoo! Bookmarks and del.icio.us is that they are both still really popular and have their own taxonomies. Yahoo! Bookmarks does look a bit nicer than del.icio.us but del.icio.us is pretty flexible when it comes to searching for links, sharing links and moving them around. I would like to see del.icio.us be the choice of bookmarking service and also have its interface spruced up a bit. It really isn’t the most visually appealing interface once you get past the front page.
What do you use? What are you preferences?
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What do you think?